Woods
have made huge leaps forward with almost every album since their
ramshackle beginnings as a stony folk collective. Their songs, always
tuneful and hemmed with emotional push, had a tendency to get a little
lost in the presentation on their earliest recordings, with songwriter
Jeremy Earl‘s
mournful tunes often disrupted by interjections of noise or sullied by
murky production. The smoke was beginning to clear with 2009′s Songs of Shame, though the band was still indulging in side-long jams and noisy sidesteps. Released in 2012, Bend Beyond stood as the clearest document of
Woods to date, sounding like a streamlined update to ’70s roots rockers like
the Band,
Dylan, or
Neil Young when backed by
Crazy Horse at their most ragged.
